Banning private health care kills: Equality at the cost of human lives

Banning private health care kills: Equality at the cost of human lives

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Imagine that you have worked hard and saved money so that you can achieve your goals and enjoy yourself but also to be equipped to deal with any surprises life might throw at you. You have had your annual check-up with your doctor, and he calls you back after results of the blood tests are in. Something is amiss and he suspects it is something potentially life-threatening that would require treatment soon. To confirm his diagnosis, the doctor needs you to have a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. Your two choices are to wait about nine months to have the scan done in the public health care system (nine months is the average wait time in Alberta, my home province) or to pay about $700 and have the scan done within a week at a private clinic.—How would you feel if your doctor now told you that the private option has just been eliminated, out of the initiative of medical regulator of the province, for the sake of equality?

Earlier this month, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, the organization that registers and regulates doctors in Alberta, proposed exactly that: elimination of privately provided diagnostic services such as MRIs and computed tomography (CT) scans as unethical (see the news story here). Their argument? That it is unfair to provide private diagnostic services because not everyone can afford them. And this comes from an organization that is supposed to give guidance to doctors, who are supposed to heal patients. What this proposal, if accepted as a guideline and transformed into a law, will lead to is not healing but killing patients. If timely diagnosis is not available, treatment is delayed and in life-threatening conditions may indeed come too late. See George Jonas’ column in the National Post about this here.

The Alberta medical regulator’s proposal to ban private diagnostic services is based on the evil anti-human-life philosophy of egalitarianism.  The College argues that if everyone cannot afford the same private diagnostic services, then no-one should have them; we should all be equally miserable. By preventing those who can afford private diagnostics from getting them, the College will indeed spread the misery by making the queues in the public system longer, making everyone’s treatments delayed, with the same deadly consequences. It is monstrous that an organization providing moral guidance to doctors is not advocating saving lives but sacrificing them.

By the principle of egalitarianism, you should not be free to spend your money on your own health care unless and until everyone else can afford the same care. By this same logic, if a patient breaks an arm, a doctor should go and break others’ arms as well—to make everyone equal. Egalitarianism is evil because it takes away individuals’ right to make choices about their own life and punishes them for hard work and responsibility. The proposal by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta to ban private diagnostic services is doubly evil, because it will kill patients and also wipe out the private diagnostic clinics who have been offering their life-saving services based on voluntary trade. We should fight all proposals like this as gross violations of individual rights and threats to our lives.

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3 Responses

    1. Kavon: yes, it is hard to believe that banning private health care is advocated by physicians, but as you can see from the news coverage, I did not make it up. This shows the power of (bad) philosophy.

  1. I suggest two problems with the AB medical association:
    – activists within it (a serious problem with the Association of Professional Engineers of B.C., for example.
    – fear of government boots (the BC government took authority away from a real estate licensing body and from a medical body, over-ruled a vote by the law society to accept graduates of Trinity Western University (which does not agree with abortion), and APEGBC staff and council live in fear it will do so to them because it hasn’t adopted the false panacea of mandatory CPD (which will only create a false impression since most failures will not be prevented by it, sloppiness and ethical lapses are the common causes)).

    The TWU cases is a clear violation of individual rights, as bad as laws forbidding abortion. (TWU may to some extent at the mercy of the BC government for accreditation, I don’t know if it accepts funding from the government.)

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Jaana Woiceshyn teaches business ethics and competitive strategy at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Canada.

She has lectured and conducted seminars on business ethics to undergraduate, MBA and Executive MBA students, and to various corporate audiences for over 20 years both in Canada and abroad. Before earning her Ph.D. from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, she helped turn around a small business in Finland and worked for a consulting firm in Canada.

Jaana’s research on technological change and innovation, value creation by business, executive decision-making, and business ethics has been published in various academic and professional journals and books. “How to Be Profitable and Moral” is her first solo-authored book.

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